Vehicle-mounted camera systems such as rearview cameras have become mainstays in luxury vehicles and even some lower-end vehicles. Depending on the particular implementation, a vehicle camera system may be used for improved vision, automated parallel parking, and/or other purposes. For example, images captured by vehicle-mounted cameras may be displayed on a navigation system display screen of the vehicle providing the driver with an unobstructed backward view (i.e., better than the rearview mirror) or overhead view of the vehicle (i.e. showing the vehicle's surroundings).
Several cameras may be mounted to a vehicle to capture all of the surroundings of the vehicle (i.e., the full 360 degrees). Such vehicle-mounted camera systems may utilize wide-angle cameras such as those having fisheye lenses (i.e., fisheye cameras) in order to minimize the number of cameras necessary to capture the vehicle surroundings. Images of the surroundings of the vehicle are typically generated and displayed as inverse projections to the ground plane. Accordingly, objects located on the ground (e.g., parking lines) are typically correctly projected; however, vertical objects such as other vehicles and pedestrians have distorted projections because they are not completely located on the ground plane. Additionally, overlapping areas of neighboring cameras have different projections of a single real-world point, which causes image ambiguity, duplicity, and/or invisible objects. Further, the distortions associated with fisheye images make it difficult to identify and classify surrounding objects (e.g., vehicles, pedestrians, buildings, street signs, etc.).